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The Big 150 and A State of the Blog Update

First of all, to those of you who have just started to follow along here- welcome, thank you, and I hope you enjoy what you see! Feel free to reach out through comments, e-mail (3pstartgaming@gmail) or on Twitter (@the3rdplayer) if you want to chat sometime. If you’ve been around and/or already chat me up, thanks for that. I’ve seriously enjoyed interacting with everyone I’ve gotten the chance to!

Recently, I was hanging out with my buddy, Alex (a.k.a ShoggothOnTheRoof) and our spouses when I took a glance at our review archive. I enjoy looking at the list and seeing if anything sparks something to write about or play. Then I thought ‘hey, I wonder how many games we’ve written about’.

Well, my math might be off but if I read it right, my last review brought us to 150 games that we’ve discussed- either in series overviews or in-depth reviews. Since I started this blog a few years ago and brought it over to WordPress, I’ve been learning plenty and seeing what a fantastic community the video game blogging world can be.

Honestly, the last span of time working on this blog and witnessing what others are doing has been a trip! I want to take a quick look back and forward, though, while I’m thinking of it.

Reviews in Retrospect

After looking through the list of games we’ve talked about, I picked a few that I’m either particularly proud of or that I think should be a fun read whether you’re new to 3PStart or just looking for a fun few pieces to pass the time:

Sweet Home – My first review I ever did for the blog and a criminally unrecognized forebearer of survival horror. Despite being a Japan-only release, the translation brought it over to us and it became one of my favorite games- enough to prompt me into starting a gaming blog!

Zombies Ate My Neighbors – Constantly vying for my favorite game of all time with Final Fantasy VI, this review is probably the best example right now that I have of my writing when I’m head over heels for a work.

Phantasy Star IV – While I wrote about the first three fairly recently, ShoggothOnTheRoof wrote a fantastic piece on the fourth entry of the series before I dug into those. Honestly, while he has some amazing pieces on here, I know about his passion for this game and it’s reflected in his piece.

Fire Emblem – An Overview – This series on Fire Emblem is more educational than subjective, but that’s another goal of mine: to educate on games, their histories, and their development. If you’re at all wondering if you want to try Fire Emblem, this can hopefully help.

Where is 3PStart Heading?

First, I’m sure there’ll be more overviews and reviews. Specifically, I’ve been working on continuing the overviews for Fire Emblem with some snippets here and there and writing about the next trilogy in the Atelier series. There are at least three or four other games in the pipeline to write about so- I’m at no shortage of material. It’s just a matter of writing it!

Ideally, I’ll be working to collaborate a bit more and either seek out some more contributors or maybe even contribute to some other projects, if I can. I’ve really been digging some of the interactions I’ve been seeing and the community has been a creative lot. I enjoy working with people and incorporating other folks’ opinions and ideas has been something I’ve been interested in from the get-go.

On a technical standpoint, I’d like to improve the site and add more ways to check out other blogs and projects going on. I don’t get to read as much as I’d like, but once I streamline the blog a bit and create a few more directories and pages, that might be something that can easily be fixed (and I can share more of the work going on outside of 3PStart, too!)

Last, I want to help promote and celebrate positivity in the gaming community. There are a lot of people working against the negative stereotypes that have grown regarding gamers and their attitudes. People who enjoy gaming, analyzing the business and the games themselves, and generally enjoying their hobbies and passions with others- there are a lot of people who are doing exactly what this section of the pop culture community needs. They are encouraging healthy discourse, constructive debate, and generally working toward making things less toxic. I think these efforts are worth mentioning and I want to figure out ways to illuminate them.

So I guess in short- I’m glad I’m still working on this project, and I hope to get more out there so that my little corner of the gaming world can be a safe place for people to discuss games and learn a little something or reminisce. I’m pretty happy with the direction I’m going in, and I’m glad to have folks along for the ride, as well.

2 thoughts on “The Big 150 and A State of the Blog Update”

Wow! Congratulations on making it this far! Discussing that many games is quite an accomplishment. And I know what you mean when it comes to interactions within this sphere; in a lot of ways, I find it more reliable than reading what mainstream outlets have to say about a given game.